Valentine’s Day: Relationships and King Arthur

Okay, so I know this is a day late. But I have been thinking it over this long, I promise!!!

So of course being a post about Valentine’s I wanted to talk about relationships and my thoughts about them. I know what you are thinking. “Oh great, here comes the 12 page epic love poem, or the whiny emo rant about being alone.” Not at all. I was actually pleasantly surprised to find myself happy on Valentine’s Day. I enjoyed giving my closest friends Valentine’s like we were in third grade again, and generally had an average day otherwise. But I didn’t spend it curled up on my bed wishing I never had to get up again as I have in the past.

But as I analyzed the why, because I’m a freak like that and like to know why I feel a certain way, I started thinking. It’s because I have accepted a few things about being alone that apparently I hadn’t accepted until rather recently. And I am honestly not even sure when it happened. But first, before I get more into that let me talk about relationships.

Every successful relationship (the culmination of such being marriage) I have encountered has a common theme. As much as the partners in said relationship live together and move forward through life together it is a melding of equals. Both support and pursue their dreams equally. And I am sad to admit I have yet to have such a relationship. I have a bad tendency to either dominate or submit in a relationship, because either I am myself and become overbearing wiping the other person out, or I subsume parts of my personality in order to not dominate the relationship. Basically, I haven’t found anyone who is my equal. That sounds arrogant, but it’s not about intelligence or any real thing I can quantify as far as I can tell. The only word I have for it is soul mate.

And in my life I have experienced a lot of things. Good and bad, but honestly mostly good. That is part of what this blog was about, sharing my thoughts and insights with others hoping they could learn something from the wisdom I have gathered. But certain things have happened for a reason. For instance, my spiritual beliefs are very agnostic. I believe mere mortals cannot understand the underlying truth of the universe and that there are not only things man was not meant to know, but things man cannot know. This is a hard path to follow, and very lonely. But it is the one I believe God has sent me down. For some reason, He wants me to walk this path and I have faithfully believed in that since I affirmed my beliefs as an agnostic deist. In the end, I believe I will end up where He wants me, and in a good place.

But until Tuesday I had never considered my inability to find that special someone in the same light. I know you are thinking “OH NO! Here it is, finally! The emo rant!” I have spent many, many years being “alone” in the girlfriend sense. 7 years between high school and my last relationship, and now around a year and a half since the tumultous 6 month long distance relationship. One of my friends made the statement, “I am not any prettier than you are, and I know I could get plenty of girls. So go for it!” a few years back and my response was “I don’t want just any girl.” I realized at that point I was waiting for something special. I think that I have finally accepted that I am searching for someone truly amazing and that I may never find it, and why I wasn’t depressed this year on Singles Awareness Day.

I am sure you are still wondering what King Arthur has to do with all of this. I loved that story as a kid and it’s easy to see why. It has everything. Knights, nobility, chivalry, war, betrayal, truly epic love, and interwoven through all of it is the quest for one object: The Holy Grail. And the main character, King Arthur, even after being repeatedly told he is unworthy and will never find the Grail still keeps looking. He spends his entire life searching for the unattainable Grail, and the legend says he never found it although he knew that someone else did. But there was no jealousy in his heart from Gaiwan finding it, just acceptance and knowledge that he wasn’t done yet.

The lesson? I haven’t stopped searching for the truth or God just because I believe I truly couldn’t understand Him even if found. By the same thought, I won’t truly stop searching for my soul mate until I find her. Because even if I never succeed, the journey will be worth it.